Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body

Take a funny and illuminating tour of the female body with award-winning comedian Sara Pascoe. Women have so much going on, what with boobs and jealousy and menstruating and broodiness and sex and infidelity and pubes and wombs and jobs and memories and emotions and the past and the future and themselves and each other. Here's a book that deals with all of it. Sara Pascoe has joked about femininity and sexuality on stage and screen, but now she has a book to talk about it all for a bit longer.

How to Be a Woman

1913 - Suffragette throws herself under the King's horse. 1969 - Feminists storm Miss World. Now - Caitlin Moran rewrites "The Female Eunuch" from a bar stool and demands to know why pants are getting smaller. There's never been a better time to be a woman: we have the vote and the Pill, and we haven't been burnt as witches since 1727. However, a few nagging questions do remain.... Why are we supposed to get Brazilians? Should you get Botox? Do men secretly hate us? What should you call your vagina?

I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power

Based on seven years of ground-breaking research and hundreds of interviews, I Thought It Was Just Me shines a long-overdue light on an important truth: Our imperfections are what connect us to each other and to our humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses; they are powerful reminders to keep our hearts and minds open to the reality that we're all in this together.

A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

As well as being a prize-winning, best-selling novelist, Siri Hustvedt is widely regarded as a leading thinker in the fields of neurology, feminism, art criticism and philosophy. She believes passionately that art and science are too often kept separate and that conversations across disciplines are vital to increasing our knowledge of the human mind and body, how they connect and how we think, feel and see.

The Way of Men

What is masculinity? Ask ten men and you'll get ten vague, conflicting answers. Unlike any book of its kind, The Way of Men offers a simple, straightforward answer - without getting bogged down in religion, morality, or politics. It's a guide for understanding who men have been and the challenges men face today. The Way of Men captures the silent, stifling rage of men everywhere who find themselves at odds with the overregulated, overcivilized, politically correct modern world.

The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World

The most important issue in a gay man's life is not "coming out", but coming to terms with the invalidating past. Despite the progress made in recent years, many gay men still wonder, "Are we better off?" The byproduct of growing up gay in a straight world continues to be the internalization of shame, rejection, and anger - a toxic cocktail that can lead to drug abuse, promiscuity, alcoholism, depression, and suicide.

Bad Feminist

Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink - all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.

Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle That Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 358 Years

'I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.' It was with these words, written in the 1630s, that Pierre de Fermat intrigued and infuriated the mathematics community. For over 350 years, proving Fermat's Last Theorem was the most notorious unsolved mathematical problem, a puzzle whose basics most children could grasp but whose solution eluded the greatest minds in the world.

The Female Eunuch

A worldwide best seller, The Female Eunuch is a landmark book in the history of the women's movement and a ground-breaking feminist tract. Drawing from history, literature, and popular culture - past and present - Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is both an important social commentary and a passionately argued polemical masterpiece. This is one of the most famous, most widely read books on feminism ever written.

The Argonauts

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author's relationship with the artist Harry Dodge. This story, which includes Nelson's account of falling in love with Dodge, who is fluidly gendered, as well as her journey to and through a pregnancy, is an intimate portrayal of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife.

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently

Being a woman is largely about performance - how we dress and modify our bodies, what we say, the roles we play, and how we conform to expectations. Gender stereotypes are still deeply embedded in our society, but Emer O'Toole is on a mission to rewrite the old script and bend the rules of gender - and she shows how and why we should all be joining in. Exploring what it means to "act like a girl", Emer takes us on a hilarious and thought-provoking journey through her life.

Miss Nadia C Gasper says:"A Treat for Women and a Must for Educating Men"

Everyday Sexism

Women are standing up and #shoutingback. In a culture that's driven by social media, for the first time women are using this online space (@EverydaySexism www.everydaysexism.com) to come together, share their stories, and encourage a new generation to recognise the problems that women face. This book is a call to arms in a new wave of feminism and it proves sexism is endemic - socially, politically, and economically. But women won't stand for it.

In Your Prime: Older, Wiser, Happier

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of In Your Prime, written and read by India Knight. Our mothers' 50 is not our 50. We have no map, no blueprint, no nothing. There is no longer any sense of what is and isn't age appropriate, or even of whether age-appropriateness is still relevant. We're supposed to be grown up, but we seldom feel it. With In Your Prime, India Knight provides answers to the modern-day dilemmas of getting older.

The Housekeeper's Tale: The Women Who Really Ran the English Country House

The Housekeeper's Tale reveals the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers. Using secret diaries, unpublished letters, and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households.

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

It was the 1960s - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the "Help Wanted" ads were segregated by gender and the "Mad Men" office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the "Swinging Sixties." Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.

Alisa Vitti will teach you how to support the chemical conversation of your entire endocrine system, from your head to your ovaries. With a few easy strategies and changes to your diet and lifestyle, you can not only solve hormone-related problems, but have the energy, mental focus, and stable moods to be your best self. Simply put, once you support the flow of your hormones, you create flow in your life. In WomanCode, you will learn how to connect the dots between your symptoms, your biochemistry, and food.

The Feminine Mystique

The book that changed the consciousness of a country - and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic - these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since.

An unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women's sexuality that rivals the culture-shifting Kinsey Report, from two of America's leading research psychologists. Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When University of Texas at Austin clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.

I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn't): Telling the Truth about Perfectionism, Inadequacy, and Power

Based on seven years of ground-breaking research and hundreds of interviews, I Thought It Was Just Me shines a long-overdue light on an important truth: Our imperfections are what connect us to each other and to our humanity. Our vulnerabilities are not weaknesses; they are powerful reminders to keep our hearts and minds open to the reality that we're all in this together.

Bad Feminist

Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink - all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.

Fermat's Last Theorem: The Story of a Riddle That Confounded the World's Greatest Minds for 358 Years

'I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.' It was with these words, written in the 1630s, that Pierre de Fermat intrigued and infuriated the mathematics community. For over 350 years, proving Fermat's Last Theorem was the most notorious unsolved mathematical problem, a puzzle whose basics most children could grasp but whose solution eluded the greatest minds in the world.

The Female Eunuch

A worldwide best seller, The Female Eunuch is a landmark book in the history of the women's movement and a ground-breaking feminist tract. Drawing from history, literature, and popular culture - past and present - Germaine Greer's searing examination of women's oppression is both an important social commentary and a passionately argued polemical masterpiece. This is one of the most famous, most widely read books on feminism ever written.

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women

The bestselling classic that redefined our view of the relationship between beauty and female identity. In today's world, women have more power, legal recognition, and professional success than ever before. Alongside the evident progress of the women's movement, however, writer and journalist Naomi Wolf is troubled by a different kind of social control, which, she argues, may prove just as restrictive as the traditional image of homemaker and wife.

Girls Will Be Girls: Dressing Up, Playing Parts and Daring to Act Differently

Being a woman is largely about performance - how we dress and modify our bodies, what we say, the roles we play, and how we conform to expectations. Gender stereotypes are still deeply embedded in our society, but Emer O'Toole is on a mission to rewrite the old script and bend the rules of gender - and she shows how and why we should all be joining in. Exploring what it means to "act like a girl", Emer takes us on a hilarious and thought-provoking journey through her life.

Miss Nadia C Gasper says:"A Treat for Women and a Must for Educating Men"

Everyday Sexism

Women are standing up and #shoutingback. In a culture that's driven by social media, for the first time women are using this online space (@EverydaySexism www.everydaysexism.com) to come together, share their stories, and encourage a new generation to recognise the problems that women face. This book is a call to arms in a new wave of feminism and it proves sexism is endemic - socially, politically, and economically. But women won't stand for it.

The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace

It was the 1960s - a time of economic boom and social strife. Young women poured into the workplace, but the "Help Wanted" ads were segregated by gender and the "Mad Men" office culture was rife with sexual stereotyping and discrimination. Lynn Povich was one of the lucky ones, landing a job at Newsweek, renowned for its cutting-edge coverage of civil rights and the "Swinging Sixties." Nora Ephron, Jane Bryant Quinn, Ellen Goodman, and Susan Brownmiller all started there as well. It was a top-notch job - for a girl - at an exciting place. But it was a dead end.

The Feminine Mystique

The book that changed the consciousness of a country - and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic - these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since.

An unparalleled exploration of the mysteries underlying women's sexuality that rivals the culture-shifting Kinsey Report, from two of America's leading research psychologists. Do women have sex simply to reproduce or display their affection? When University of Texas at Austin clinical psychologist Cindy M. Meston and evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss joined forces to investigate the underlying sexual motivations of women, what they found astonished them.

Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism

Empowerment, liberation, choice. Once the watchwords of feminism, these terms have now been co-opted by a society that sells women an airbrushed, highly sexualised and increasingly narrow vision of femininity. Drawing on a wealth of research and personal interviews, Living Dolls is a straight-talking, passionate, and important book that makes us look afresh at women and girls, at sexism and femininity - today.

Vagina: A New Biography

When an unexpected medical crisis sends Naomi Wolf on a deeply personal journey to tease out the intersections between sexuality and creativity, she discovers, much to her own astonishment, an increasing body of scientific evidence that suggests that the vagina is not merely flesh, but an intrinsic component of the female brain - and thus has a fundamental connection to female consciousness itself.

Feminism: A Very Short Introduction

This is a historical account of feminism that looks at the roots of feminism, voting rights, and the liberation of the 60s, and analyzes the current situation of women across Europe, in the United States, and elsewhere in the world, particularly the Third World countries.

Men Explains Things to Me

Rebecca Solnit's essay 'Men Explain Things to Me' has become a touchstone of the feminist movement, inspired the term 'mansplaining', and established Solnit as one of the leading feminist thinkers of our time - one who has inspired everyone from radical activists to Beyonce Knowles. Collected here in print for the first time is the essay itself, along with the best of Solnit's feminist writings.

Pushback: How Smart Women Ask - and Stand Up - for What They Want

In Pushback, top leadership consultant Selena Rezvani argues that self-advocacy is critical to success. Yet women initiate negotiations four times less often than men, resulting in getting less of what they want - promotion opportunities, plum assignments, and higher pay. This book shines a light on the real rules of holding your own and pushing back for what is rightfully yours. Drawing on interviews with high-level leaders, Rezvani offers listeners the truth about how women have asked their way to the top.

Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

Meet the Female Chauvinist Pig - the new brand of "empowered woman" who wears the Playboy bunny as a talisman, bares all for Girls Gone Wild, pursues casual sex as if it were a sport, and embraces "raunch culture". If male chauvinist pigs of years past thought of women as pieces of meat, Female Chauvinist Pigs of today are doing them one better. They think they're being brave, they think they're being funny, but in Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy asks if the joke is on them.

My Romantic Love Wars: A Sexual Memoir

Betty Dodson's memoir is the story of one woman's struggle to liberate female sexuality while enjoying her own. In the 70s, as the feminist movement evolved, Betty latched on to sexual liberation as a symbol for self empowerment. Realizing that so many women weren't enjoying sex, she asked, "How could women ever be truly equal if they were reliant on men for their sexual satisfaction?" She quickly became the leader of the sex-positive feminist movement.

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality

It's surprising that the term "heterosexuality" is less than 150 years old and that heterosexuality's history has never before been written, given how obsessed we are with it. In Straight, independent scholar Hanne Blank delves deep into the contemporary psyche as well as the historical record to chronicle the realm of heterosexual relations - a subject that is anything but straight and narrow.

A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft, often described as the first major feminist, is remembered principally as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and there has been a tendency to view her most famous work in isolation. Yet Wollstonecraft's pronouncements about women grew out of her reflections about men, and her views on the female sex constituted an integral part of a wider moral and political critique of her times which she first fully formulated in A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790).

Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation

First published in 1999, the groundbreaking Exile and Pride is essential to the history and future of disability politics. Eli Clare's revelatory writing about his experiences as a white disabled genderqueer activist/writer established him as one of the leading writers on the intersections of queerness and disability and permanently changed the landscape of disability politics and queer liberation.